It is considered the final novel under any banner to feature the Seventh Doctor as the "current" Doctor, although McGann's Eighth Doctor had already made his televised appearance by the time the novel was published. Due to a publication delay, however, an earlier-commissioned novel, So Vile a Sin, also featuring the Seventh Doctor, was published later (although it takes place earlier than Lungbarrow in continuity). One additional Eighth Doctor novel would be published under the Virgin New Adventures banner before the series was handed over to Bernice Summerfield.

At the root of all is an ancient and terrible place, the House of Lungbarrow in the southern mountains of Gallifrey. Something momentous is happening there. But the House has inexplicably gone missing.

673 years ago the Doctor left his family in that forgotten House. Abandoned, disgraced and resentful, they have waited. And now he's home at last.

In this, the Seventh Doctor's final New Adventure, he faces a threat that could uncover the greatest secret of them all.

His mind occupied with thoughts of his coming regeneration, the TARDIS accidentally returns the Doctor to Gallifrey and the House of Lungbarrow, where for over 673 years his 44 cousins have been trapped, but mysteriously only six of them are still left. Meanwhile, Chris Cwej is having strange dreams of the past, when the family cast the Doctor out. The Doctor is accused of the murder of the head of the House, but finds many allies in the form of former companions Ace, Romana, K-9 Mark I and K-9 Mark II and Leela, who have become embroiled in a Celestial Intervention Agency plot to overthrow Romana's presidency. The secrets of the past are catching up to the Doctor, in particular the secret linking him to a figure from Gallifreyan history known only as the Other.

Lungbarrow wrapped up the last of the continuity of the New Adventures and put the Doctor on course to gather the Master's remains from Skaro, as depicted in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie. It is also one of a number of the New Adventures which is hard to obtain and is often seen on auction websites such as eBay at prices many times the original cover price.

Before losing their license to BBC Books, it had been announced that the Seventh Doctor's adventures would have continued in periodic Missing Adventures releases, with the Eighth Doctor taking over the NA line. Ultimately, only one Eighth Doctor novel was published and the MA line came to an end before any Seventh Doctor releases could occur. Future Seventh Doctor novels would be released under the BBC Past Doctor Adventures line.

The Seventh Doctor's last words in the Virgin New Adventures series are; "Dorothee! I just remembered. I haven't been Merlin yet!"

The novel which followed Lungbarrow, Lance Parkin's The Dying Days, featured the Eighth Doctor. When Virgin subsequently lost their license to print original Doctor Who fiction, they chose to focus on a character from the New Adventures which the BBC did not own, former companion Bernice Summerfield. Lungbarrow serves, in concert with Dying Days, to gradually increase the standing of Summerfield's character, laying the groundwork for the later appearance of the Seventh Doctor's then-companion, Chris Cwej, in Summerfield's own novels.

Along the way to this resolution, Lungbarrow ultimately reveals much new information about the Doctor's home world and race, some of which had been hinted at ever since the first New Adventures novel. Many of the New Adventures authors migrated to the BBC Books Doctor Who line and elements of this backstory also made their way into subsequent novels. However, there have also been elements in those novels that contradict it.

The claim that Time Lords are born fully mature, never having a physical childhood, has been contradicted by several pieces of media.

In the television story The Sound of Drums, the Master is shown as a child in a Time Lord ritual. The Tenth Doctor specifically mentions that before this ritual, "[the c]hildren of Gallifrey [were] taken from their families [at the] age of eight to enter the Academy." The television story The End of Time reuses footage from Drums while the Master's childhood is discussed. In The End of Time, the Chancellor refers to the "simple task" of the four beats of a Time Lord's heartbeat being transmitted back in time and implanted into "the Master's mind as a child".

In the television story The Girl in the Fireplace, Reinette describes the Doctor as having a "lonely childhood" and being "[s]uch a lonely little boy" while she looks inside the Tenth Doctor's mind. In TV: The Empty Child, the Ninth Doctor himself similarly remarks that he knows what it's like to be the "only child left out in the cold".

The Ninth Doctor agrees with Doctor Constantine's remark of being a "father and grandfather" in the television story The Empty Child, the Tenth Doctor recounts being "a dad" or "a father" in the television story Fear Her and The Doctor's Daughter and his twelfth incarnation mentions his "dad skills" in Listen. In the television story The Witch's Familiar, Missy mentions a daughter from "the olden days on Gallifrey". In the television story Hell Bent, the Twelfth Doctor mentions how the Doctor "stole" the moon and the President's wife, before correcting himself to say that was a lie from the Shobogans, and she was actually the President's daughter, and the moon was lost.

In the television story Death in Heaven, the Twelfth Doctor recalls running together with the Master when the Doctor was "little".

In the television story Heaven Sent, the Twelfth Doctor recounts a memory from when he was a "very little boy" about a woman who resembled the Veil, which gave him nightmares for years.

Daryl Joyce's cover for the e-book version of Lungbarrow.

A second edition of Lungbarrow, featuring both additions to and subtractions from the original text made by the author and accompanied by author's notes and new illustrations by Daryl Joyce, was released by BBCi as an e-book on the official Doctor Who website on 22 August2003. It became inaccessible in 2010.

The Houses of Gallifrey are similar to the household featured in Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. Badger, a character who makes his first appearance in Lungbarrow, has much in common with a character in Peake's Gormenghast novella, Boy in Darkness, which originally appeared in the collected work Sometime, Never by Golding, Wyndham and Peake. [1]

Lance Parkin on an Outpost Gallifrey forum thread [2] stated in 2005 that the reason the last three books in the Virgin New Adventures range, including Lungbarrow, were so expensive on the secondary market was excessive demand, rather than an unusually low initial print run. However, he also noted that reprints of these books were not allowed, because Virgin's license expired before a second printing might otherwise have been made.

The numbering of this book as 60 of 61 refers to the publisher's intended order, which ultimately was not the actual order of publication. Because of chronic delays troubling Ben Aaronovitch's So Vile a Sin, eventually finished by Kate Orman, it was actually the 59th New Adventure published.